Month: April 2017

The lava and ice queen’s battle raged up and down the street. Their powers sent parts of the road sailing into the air. As the Ice Queen fought she tried to blast Coco and Rosa but they just seemed to be dodging every blast she forcefully threw at them. All of a sudden, the Ice Queen froze the Lava Queen, her blast too powerful for the Lava Queen to melt. The Ice Queen sneered. with a stomp of her feet, another ice blast flew at the frozen queen and shattered her into a million sharp pieces. The Ice Queen turned on her heel to face Coco and Rosa. Startled, they both ran across the street toward the nearby woods where the thickness of the trees would make it hard for the Ice Queen to find them. They ran through the woods, trees grabbing at their clothes and scratching at their faces. Sweat streaked down rosa’s face and her lunges burned from lack of air. Coco screamed. Rosa turned around to find her brother sprawled out face first on the moist forest dirt. The Ice Queen had blasted him on the shoulder. An anger swelled up from Rosa’s

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stomach. An anger so deep and dark she screamed.

“Run!” Coco said in barley a whisper.

Rosa planted her feet and ignored him. The anger started swelling up inside her. Her hand started shaking out of control. Just as quickly as it came, it stopped. The birds hummed but the Ice Queen was quiet. Without thinking, Rosa blasted a sparkling substance out of her hand and at the queen. Magic. she thought. While the queen lay on the floor Rosa helped Coco to his feet. They began to run. After a while, Coco and Rosa had to stop to catch their breath. Coco looked up at rosa and said agitatedly.

“How come you never told me.” he was frowning.

“I didn’t know,” Rosa said quietly, looking down at her torn sneakers.

“Well, we can talk a bout it later.” he replied with a tone of aggression in his voice. he turned away from her again and they started sprinting through the woods. All of a sudden the both tripped over a fallen tree branch and into a deep hole.

When Coco looked around him he was in a large, dark room. He figured the Ice queen had captured him and separated him from Rosa. Who’s their said a girl’s voice?. Well it depends who’s asking Coco said walking toward the source of the voice. My name is Bella . the Ice queen captured me some time ago. Are you here to rescue me? No I’m so sorry my name is Coco Coco said. The room was dark but Coco could see the confused look on Bella’s face. O.k.a.y said Bella.

I have been using Punnett squares to help me learn about dominant and recessive traits. A Punnett square is a chart you can use to identify what dominant or recessive traits you may have inherited from your parents. You can use capital letters to represent dominant traits and lower case letters to represent recessive traits. So, if there is a capital letter in front of a lower case letter, then the dominant trait will mask over the recessive trait, this is called a heterozygous dominant genotype. (Heterozygous is pair of genes where one is dominant and one is recessive—the dominant one shows.)

I did a project using two popsicle sticks representing chromosomes (chromosomes are the part of every cell that caries genetic information). On them there were some capital and lower case letters on them representing genes. (Genes carry the traits transferred from the parent to the offspring, for example eye color and hair texture.)

I chose one for a male parent and another for a female parent and lined them up next to each other to see witch genotype their offspring would have (genotypes show what alleles you inherit for each trait).

The letters that were capital masked the lower case alleles (Alleles are one of a pair of genes that appear on a particular location on a particular chromosome—some are dominant and some are recessive. Dominant means to be in control, so the dominant allele masks the recessive one. To show a recessive trait, both alleles must be recessive.)

Then, I recorded the information of each gene. Some of the pairs of genes were Homozygous. (Homozygous means you’ve got a pair of matching Alleles—either both dominant or both recessive.)

There were a lot of heterozygous genotypes. There was a chart on the paper for my genetics activity where I was marking the information I got. Then I put the genotypes next to each other to show what phenotype my bug had for each gene. (Phenotype is an organism’s physical appearance and behavior) The capital letters were Dominant and the lower cases ones were recessive. So, for example if the chromosomes lined up with the eye color gene as Ee, that meant the insect would have the dominant eye color of blue. If the body section gene was Bb, that meant the insect would have 3 marshmallow body segments. Three pairs of legs had the genotype of LL.

Here is my little genetic experiment. I call her Tassie. The only recessive trait she has is tt, for 1 pair of wings.